


By Feel

by the-reylo-void (Anysia)



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, Gratuitous Hand Holding, Loneliness, Valentine's Day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-24
Updated: 2018-02-24
Packaged: 2019-03-23 06:35:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13781811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anysia/pseuds/the-reylo-void
Summary: This holiday probably wouldn't be so terrible if she'd ever known what it felt like to be loved. If she believed in it.





	By Feel

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CoupDeFoudRey](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CoupDeFoudRey/gifts).



> Hastily-written un-beta'd angsty fluff for one of my favorite writers. I hope you enjoy it! :)

When someone first mentions the holiday to Rey, she can’t say she’s not a little confused.

“So it’s just about love? A whole day?” she asks and raises a skeptical eyebrow at Poe’s description.

“Well, kind of. It’s a couples’ holiday, I guess.” He’s grinning at her, and she doesn’t miss the way Lieutenant Connix shoots her a dark look as she works in the background. “A chance for people to get all warm and fuzzy with the person they love.”

Rey utters a soft “ah,” nodding in apparent comprehension enough that Poe seems content with his explanation and moves to address a pair of pilots attempting to draw his attention.

“It’s the worst,” Connix mutters, and Rey watches as she sets down a datapad just a little too hard. “If the person you love is someone you can’t even reach.”

Rey isn’t sure Connix is talking to her, not with the way her eyes seem to be glancing at everything except Poe, the way she doesn’t even notice when Rey slips from the command room.

_Love._

Rey frowns a little as she steps into the humid air on Taris, leans back against the battered durasteel wall of the vine-choked spire the tatters of the Resistance had ducked into on the abandoned planet.

“Just temporary,” Leia had told her with a soft smile. “As we regroup. Others will come for us.”

_Others_.

There’s something heavy in the pit of Rey’s stomach that she can’t quite put a name to at their faith, their warmth for people they can’t even see.

Rey had left so much of her own to the sinking fields of Jakku ages ago.

The last of it had died just a few weeks earlier, when she’d had to forsake the same hand she was desperate to touch.

* * *

 

The holiday has a name that she’s already forgotten when it arrives three days later.

She’s in a foul mood, haunted by nightmares that slip from her grasp as she wakes, leaving only the faded imprint of a scream against her tongue.

(She pretends she doesn’t remember the name still burning at the tip of it.)

The base seems paired into couples, not the perfunctory scavenging pairs she’d seen formed at Niima Outpost when new scrap sites were discovered (more to haul, more to split).

No, these are something _else_ , and she watches at the way Connix seems to shadow Poe’s steps, the way Rose and Finn smile and talk quietly to each other.

Rey wants to be happy for them. She feels like she should, somehow.

But it’s a wistful thing, as she watches the connection sparking between lonely souls across the base.

_Love_.

Rey isn’t an innocent, not the way so many might imagine her, their pure Jedi girl, incorruptible. She’d done what she needed to survive on Jakku, after all – she’d kissed and touched and even made noise if the pay had been good enough, if they’d thrown in extra portions.

But she never gave her name, and they never asked. Love was a foreign thing – laughable, almost, in the gritty terrain, one breath, one fall the only thing separating survival from starvation.

Still, as the day drags on, as she sees bright eyes and tender smiles and stolen kisses spreading throughout the base, a slow roll of contentment and affection spilling bright through the Force, she wonders, briefly, what it might be like.

What it would feel like to be loved.

* * *

 

The sun is setting pink and gold, a beautiful thing in the writhing jungle wrapping tight around the abandoned cityscape of the planet.

Rey stares out at it from the rooftop of a half caved-in office building, her arms wrapped tightly around her knees.

When the universe seems to halt, when the Force slowly parts and sighs, she almost expects it and isn’t sure why.

He’s rigid beside her, awkward, uncomfortable, but he kneels down, brings himself to her level just the same.

She wants to be angry.

She wants the Force to make him go away.

“Rey,” Ben murmurs beside her, and something in her breaks.

She reaches blindly for his hand, is relieved to find his fingers bare as her own settle over them.

_My heart hurts_ , Rey thinks to him, even though she’s not sure if the bond functions that way.

Not sure if he hears her words or merely senses her distress, because before she can react he’s twined their fingers together, light and tentative, as if she could break apart from the brush of their hands.

_I miss you_ , she hears in response, a deep, aching sigh, and when he presses his forehead to her temple, she lets him.

She’ll have to return to the base before too long, likely before nightfall, even as the sky purples and the last moments of light begin to slip away.

Back to couples and warmth and the stinging loneliness of all of it.

But not yet.

Not quite yet.

“Rey,” Ben says, and it’s a soft sigh, longing and regret and apology breathed into her name.

She closes her eyes, leans into him.

It’s a foolish thing, wild and impossible, and it will end in heartache, for them both.

But just for this moment, just until the last light fades, as the Force settles content between them, as Ben Solo squeezes her hand, as Rey catches his eye and sees unspoken words burning through them…

She doesn’t have to wonder.

She knows.


End file.
